But what about the pansies? The snapdragons?

If you look at things from a trickle-down perspective, examples like the opening shot here do touch all our lives as those at the top pull back on employment opportunities and thus squash the little guys at the bottom of the market.

But really, will anyone get too misty-eyed over the credit-market-crunch's effect on this guy?

To all appearances, he's an unlikely victim. A well-paid chief executive of a small consulting firm, he owns a substantial investment portfolio and a million-dollar house in Moraga. He pays his bills on time and has no credit card debt. His credit score, he says, is around 800, a rating more or less in the stratosphere.

But in mid-March, Bank of America cut off his home equity credit line of a little more than $180,000, citing a decline in the value of his property. Meyers, 40, is now scrambling to come up with $75,000 to pay for a major landscaping project and is canceling other big spending plans.

"My wife would like a new car, but that's going to have to wait," he said. "We're taking a $75,000 cash-flow hit, and I want to boost savings."

My god, will the madness stop? Is there no mercy left in the world? I bet her car is an '03, '05 at most!

Even the article concedes that Meyers isn't a hardship case. But it still goes on to list how much it sucks that his magic pot of money ran out.

It IS true that things do trickle down, but man, there must be a way to look at this from the bottom up, not the top down. Even if more of our area code is top-heavy.